PM Robert Fico. (source: TASR )
It has been a depressing few weeks for those of us who like to think we live in a post-Enlightenment Europe.
On February 16 the Russian government completed its assassination of Alexei Navalny, for what basically amounted to the crime of lèse-majesté (disrespecting the monarch).
Russia’s barbaric all-out war on Ukraine entered its third pointless, heart-breaking year, prompting another of those wobbles in Western sentiment that seems to occur every time horror or triumph fails to arrive fast enough to match our social media-shrivelled attention spans.
Ukraine’s agonies are real enough, but so are its resolve and capacities; the recent slew of hand-wringing ‘Can Ukraine survive?’ op-eds in the Western media, by writers who couldn’t find Avdiivka on a map, can be safely ignored.
The billions of dollars in much-needed US military support for Ukraine currently held up in the US congress are a rather more serious matter. The reason for the delay? The Republicans doing the blocking have none that they can clearly articulate; their only motivation is to satisfy the whims of another would-be monarch – in this case, self-confessed dictator manqué Donald Trump.
But Slovakia’s prime minister would like you to know that he has considered the situation in depth. He is convinced not only that Russia will prevail, but that its cause is just.
In a particularly crass move, Robert Fico chose the anniversary of the Russian invasion, 24 February, to deliver his verdict in a Facebook video. In it, he calmly repeats the patently false claim that the war was started by “Ukrainian neo-Nazis”.
He goes on to assert that Russia was somehow warranted in invading Ukraine because NATO had promised in the 1990s that it wouldn’t expand eastwards.
(This “not one inch” myth is not only a Kremlin talking point that has been comprehensively debunked by historians. Its deployment by Fico elides the rather inconvenient fact that one of the countries that joined NATO as part of its eastern enlargement was, err, Slovakia.)
But this is not all.
In perhaps his most craven act of self-abasement, Fico says the West is guilty of the “demonisation of President Putin”. Heaven forfend! What kind of world would this be, he asks us to ponder, in which we allow a monarch to be defamed simply for exercising his royal prerogative to wage war and smite his opponents?
Again, it turns out, the real crime is lèse-majesté; for this, Fico implies, the mass murder of Ukrainians is a regrettable but inevitable consequence.
Fortunately for Ukraine, the Slovak government’s policy is irrelevant – it has long since stopped delivering military aid to Ukraine, and Fico will not block European aid, much less quit NATO.
The same is not true for Slovaks, thousands of whom gathered on February 21 to mark their own grim anniversary: the murder six years ago of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. Fico’s government had little to say about this; instead, it is focused on passing laws whose effect will be to cover up or excuse much of the flagrant corruption among senior judges, police officers and politicians that the 2018 killings helped reveal.
It is easy to overlook quite how far the rot extended – and how quickly it is spreading once more.
The proposer of the current law changes, Smer MP Tibor Gašpar, was the national police chief in 2018. The searing 2022 documentary film The Killing of a Journalist, about the crime and its aftermath, focuses in part on Gašpar’s angry evasions as the situation span out of his control. He was forced to resign and later charged with corruption. His trial is pending, but the laws he steered through parliament could curtail his prosecution, and will certainly negate meaningful punishment in the unlikely event that he his convicted.
(The Killing of a Journalist is available to watch on Netflix, and is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how politics and the law work – or often don’t – in Slovakia.)
Pavla Holcová, a former colleague of Kuciak who works for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and also appears in the film, wrote in 2021 about the gob-smacking extent to which Marian Kočner, the businessman who is widely believed to have ordered the killings, routinely instructed a stable of corrupt judges on how they should rule in court cases – even dictating the exact wording of their judgements.
A key confidante of Kočner’s (he has twice been acquitted of the Kuciak murders, but the case continues and he is serving time for other offences) was Fico-appointed former deputy justice minister Monika Jankovská. An influential and well-connected judge (she is, for instance, reported to be friends with a former Constitutional Court chief justice who now sits on the Supreme Court), Jankovská faces numerous charges but has yet to be convicted of anything.
The job of deputy justice minister seems to be quite the springboard. The current incumbent has just been nominated by the government to lead the Slovak Information Service (SIS), the country’s main spy agency.
The SIS has acquired an unfortunate reputation for focusing rather more keenly on collecting political kompromat than on protecting Slovak citizens. (Numerous previous employees, including several directors, have been accused of involvement in crimes ranging from corruption to complicity in murder; happily for them, the charges never quite seem to stick.)
The man nominated to lead the SIS is none other than Tibor Gašpar’s 36-year-old son, Pavol. If Google autofill is anything to go by – “pavol gašpar tetovanie” was the top result on the day of his nomination – his main qualification for the job is the lavish tattoo on his forearm of his father Tibor, to whom he professes undying loyalty. Presumably that sentiment will be reciprocated, even though Gašpar Sr is on the parliamentary committee that is supposed to monitor the SIS. A former justice minister describes Pavol as vindictive and unsuited to the job; the present minister purports to see no conflict of interest.
President Zuzana Čaputová, who has clearly had enough of this sort of nonsense, immediately signalled that she is in no hurry to confirm Gašpar Jr’s appointment. In response, the government is now scrambling to effect an extra-legal workaround to get Pavol installed within days, without presidential approval; the committee of MPs whose job it is to vet the security services is being kept in the dark.
There is no pressing need for this: Čaputová leaves office in June and there is a good chance that Speaker Peter Pellegrini, the Waylon Smithers of Slovak politics, will replace her and quickly acquiesce. (Even if he does not, Smer’s many years in power mean it has plenty of ways to manage the SIS and its very useful snooping powers, whoever is nominally in charge.)
But once again, the ruler’s wishes are being ignored and the logic of lèse-majesté demands that opponents be trampled.
By a quirk of history, presidential elections will take place both here and in Russia in March.
Russia’s will function as little more than a coronation: ‘L'État, c'est Poutine’, as Louis XIV might have said (though it’s worth recalling that things did not end well for the Bourbons – or the Romanovs, for that matter).
The result here will indicate how far Slovaks see their role: as citizens or, increasingly, as subjects.
